Humorous, insightful and sometimes-sparkling essays that will appeal to readers interested in the pure fun of fashion.
Medine writes the well-publicized blog Man Repeller, and her debut memoir reveals extended, comedic stories about her Manhattan upbringing, adolescent embarrassments, young marriage and, always, details about what she wore.
The author defines herself as “this girl who accidentally stumbled into what turned into a career that allowed me to penetrate an industry I’d always admired.” Her penchant for sartorial choices that have nothing to do with garnering male attention—and her writing on the subject—resonates with thousands of devoted blog readers. She is candid, rebellious, outspoken and able to laugh at herself, and these qualities are on display on every page. “You can rest assured…that each and every sartorial object depicted, dramatized, and described…is as authentic a nod to my memory as it is to the clothing that shapes it,” she writes. Peppered with photos of Medine, some of which qualify in equal measure as unflattering and hilarious, the book is divided into chapters according to each one’s central item of unattractive clothing. These include “The Tent Dress,” “The White Socks,” “The Lesson of the Harem Pants,” “The Canadian Tuxedo,” and, for the closing story of her wedding, “The Big White Dress (And an Organza Jacket).” Throughout, Medine confesses to innumerable outrageous outfits and her present-day verdicts on the clothes; the aforementioned harem pants, for instance, are ruled “violently offensive,” but they did contribute, in a funny way, to her reconciling with the boyfriend she later married. In a strong, consistent narrative voice, Medine displays wit, unabashed openness and a knack for weaving seemingly superficial, materialistic details into essays that are rich with sly wisdom and the colorful personalities of family members and friends.
Humorous, insightful and sometimes-sparkling essays that will appeal to readers interested in the pure fun of fashion.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2139-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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